You Decide 2017

Well, here we are again. You'll know the score by now - once a year I open my next restaurant review to public vote. What began as a naive experiment to engage my readership in the blog decision-making process soon descended into what internet discussions always descend into - trolling, sadism, and trips to Croydon. So I won't pretend I'm expecting anything less than the dregs of the country's eating establishments to be offered up as personalised torture instruments this year - do your bloody worst. I can take it. I think.

I've got you started by entering a few places I'd actually like to eat at, for you to completely ignore.

The rules again:

1. I can't have been to the restaurant before (have a quick Google if you're unsure)

2. It has to be either in London or easily accessible from London (I'll get on a train but I'm not flying to Athens)

3. Please check the restaurant you want to vote for hasn't already been added before you add it yourself.

EDIT: Despite Dans le Noir giving it a run for its money, seems the winner is Toby Carvery, South Croydon. Why is it always Croydon? Watch this space for a review, coming soon.

JRC Global Buffet, Croydon

When I was a child, we often visited the Costa Brava for family holidays. In the very early days, we drove the entire way from Liverpool, chundering our way over the English channel on P&O Ferries and staying overnight in cheap autoroute motels. The journey was long, and boring, and expensive, but there was no other option - flights were £250/person and we didn't know anyone who could afford that kind of luxury.

Then seemingly almost overnight, budget airlines arrived, and we had at least the option of being herded onto a 2-hour Ryanair 737 flight instead of spending two days in the Mitsubishi Space Wagon. Yes, Ryanair was unreliable and uncomfortable, the staff about as personable as prison guards and the baggage allowance rules seemingly plucked from thin air for every journey, but it was cheap, and quick, and meant we could usually enjoy two extra days by the pool instead of sat in the back of the car listening to Pop Hits for Kids.

I said usually. Usually things went more or less to plan but every now and again, thanks to the wilfully "knife-edge" way the Ryanair schedules were set up, and because the slightest disruption to any flight would cause the entire network to spiral out of control for days on end, there inevitably were delays. This was bad enough on the outgoing journey; Liverpool Airport, even after its refurb and expansion was hardly a scintillating environment in which to spend 5 hours twiddling your thumbs. But if the delay happened on the journey home it meant killing time at Girona airport, a tiny, charmless building hastily constructed for the nascent seasonal trade in the 1960s and utterly unable to cope with the vast numbers of holidaymakers suddenly descending on it thanks to Michael O'Leary's aggressive business model.

There is an aim to all this preamble; please bear with me. The point is, a delay at Girona airport in the 1990s meant sitting in an over-airconditioned strip-lit box with inadquate toilet facilities, fighting for a table (if you were blessed by the gods), a hard plastic seat (if you were very lucky) or even just a space of cold floor on which to sit carefully watching your luggage, surrounded by screaming kids and their frazzled parents, glumly deciding whether to get another overpriced packet of ready salted Lays or risk a mystery meat sandwich from the Duty Free. Ironically for somewhere ostensibly built to service the leisure industry, it was the single most depressing spot on planet earth, a grim, soul-sucking and inhuman place, every corner of which seemingly designed specifically to be as upsetting as possible.

JRC Global Buffet makes Girona Airport after a 5-hour delay seem like afternoon tea at Claridge's. Alarm bells were ringing as soon as we reached the corner of this windswept car park in a retail park in Croydon and realised we had to pay in full (£20 per head) before we'd even been seated, never mind seen the food on offer. Scary signs in the reception area/new inmates' holding cell shout about "NO REFUNDS!" and "NO ENTRY WITHOUT ADMISSION TOKEN!" - it doesn't really feel like they have much confidence in the product they offer, or, for that matter, the behaviour of their customers.

Once inside the vast dining room, sat amongst the scattered tables and filthy, food-strewn floor, it becomes painfully obvious why. Perhaps the very concept of an all-you-can-eat buffet necessarily encourages waste and excess, but I have been to other examples here and abroad and with a little care and attention they can feel like just another equally valid way of serving people their dinner. I particularly remember one I visited a few years ago in Nantucket which offered fresh oysters and king crab legs from a raw bar, and a station with a man making omelettes to order. Here, in this wipe-clean departure gate with its banks of processed brownfood and bowls of lurid thin liquid, there was no incentive to behave, no effort on display to appreciate. You're expected to pile your plates high with shit you don't want and aren't expected to eat, wildly differing cuisines churned out by the same anonymous suppliers, reheated without thought and scooped up or abandoned without care.

Of course, of course, all the food tasted diabolical. How could it not? Chicken tikka pieces, apparently cooked in a real tandoor yet somehow also dry on the inside and wet on the outside with no sign of char, were the first thing I ate. Then an item of "dim sum", probably made a very long way away a very long time ago, squishy and salty in the mouth like congealed sputum. Onion bhajis, burning with a heat of way too much chilli powder and not much of anything else, a lamb kebab like pressed sawdust, a single cocktail sausage I picked up resembling something attached to a baboon at Southport Zoo from a particularly distressing childhood memory. All of it sweating away under the hot lamps, waiting to be picked up, picked at, then chucked away.

And yet, it was rammed. At 6:30pm on a Monday night. As was Frankie & Benny's next door, a different branch of which I visited in similar circumstances two years ago. So obviously there are forces at work here of which I am wholly unaware. I know I speak from the privilege of 10 years writing about food and from my central London bubble but surely I am not that divorced from the reality of what people choose to do for dinner? Why are people spending £20 each to eat food they could reheat themselves from the freezer section at Iceland for a few pence? I just don't know, it's as simple as that. I have no theories. I don't know why JRC Global Buffet has any customers.

If you must know, there was more food. Frozen chips, a gloopy beef stir fry with another bafflingly huge amount of chilli, a spoonful of that crispy seaweed you get from Chinese restaurants which I normally quite like in a guilty kind of way but here was just greasy, soggy and unseasoned. My friend had picked herself an equally bizarre selection involving noodles and paella, because that's what you do, and then while poking halfheartedly at a glass full of Angel Delight and cold jelly said "this is the worst place I've ever been to". I couldn't help but agree.

Usually after a terrible restaurant experience I can laugh about it. At Bubba Gump's last year, and in fact even after Frankie & Benny's the year before after the main trauma had worn off, it was kind of a relief to get it over with and chalk it up to experience. These yearly public vote destinations are really supposed to just be a bit of fun, shining a critical light on the kind of restaurants that would - quite rightly in most cases - often be ignored by snooty restaurant bloggers like me. I realise there's a kind of sick pleasure to be had in reading about someone else's bad experiences, and usually I'm happy to oblige.

But JRC Global Buffet is a special kind of awful. It's deliberately awful. The business minds behind it know exactly what they're doing, serving processed crap to a captive crowd of retail park shoppers, and they're getting away with it because somehow they've found enough people whose expecations of eating out are literally no more than to eat shit food until they're sick. And the longer it exists and - I can hardly believe how depressing this is - actually expands across the UK (watch out Swindon, they're coming for you next) we are all the poorer, and all the good-hearted people who run good restaurants and serve fantastic fresh food with care and love have to try that bit harder to convince the country that eating out is not just an exercise in filling your gut but can actually be one of the most rewarding experiences it's possible to have.

Anyway I'm going to stop talking about it now because I have no desire to revisit one more second of my time in JRC Global Buffet. I hate it, and it's evil and nobody should ever eat there ever again. There's your review. Now I'm off to shower in bleach.

0/10

Bubba Gump Shrimp Company, Piccadilly

The "concept" is so disastrously imbecilic even the thought of putting it into words is giving me hives, so I'll be brief. Remember that film Forrest Gump? About the man with some kind of learning disorder, not anything as unattractive as Asperger's or Down's Syndrome obviously (that would be box office Kryptonite) but that particular kind of Hollywood-retarded which basically means he talks slowly, loves his mama and unflinchingly does what other people tell him? Well, one of the stupifyingly unbelievable plot twists in this awful movie involves our "hero" taking command of an accidentally-successful fishing company. Bubba Gump Shrimp Company is a entire real-life restaurant chain based on a minor plot point in a terrible movie that last hit cinemas over twenty years ago. And it's shit.

Even if the food at Bubba Gump Shrimp Company had been any good - and it really, really wasn't - there'd still be a million other reasons to hate the place. The whole project is so disastrously flawed, the motivations for its existence so cynical and misguided, that even if this vast, ugly place sat empty of customers and its "kitchens" (or whatever you call an area where frozen food is deep fried and shovelled into paper cones) free of activity, it would still be a stupid waste of effort and space, a monument to boneheaded uselessness on a massive scale.

But add to this winning formula the kind of food usually advertised by Kerry Katona, at prices that would make a premiership footballer wince, and you have all the ingredients for a true disaster.

You enter, in the tradition of all crappy central-London tourist trash joints, through the gift shop. A nice man with a headset told us there was a 5-10 minute wait for a table which immediately made my heart sink ("Oh god, please don't let it be popular") but once upstairs we noticed with some relief and confusion about 2/3 of the tables were empty. Was the "wait" just a cynical way to get us to order a £12.49 bucket of weak margarita, while making the place seem in demand? I wouldn't put it past them at all.

Anyway, we were soon placed in a booth having the ordering system explained to us. On the table were two metal flip-signs, one reading RUN FORREST RUN and the other STOP FORREST STOP, the idea being if you wanted service you somewhat counterintuitively display the red STOP sign, otherwise staff were free to ignore you. In the end though, it served as little more than a lame reminder of the restaurant's rubbish concept, as every time you wanted anything so insignificant as a glass of water you had to turn the (large, cumbersome) sign over, wait for someone to notice, then make your order and - the real problem - remember to turn it back, as if you didn't another member of staff would rush over in the next few seconds to take your order again.

So far, then, so annoying. Then the food arrived. "Best Ever Popcorn Shrimp" looked at least generous at first glance, until on closer inspection you realised that most of the "shrimp" were actually deep-fried strips of red pepper made to look like seafood. So the red peppers tasted like greasy red peppers and the half a dozen or so "shrimp" (I'm using inverted commas because I'm not entirely convinced these things had ever seen an ocean) tasted of... well, nothing. Cooking oil. And then once we'd squeezed a lemon over them, cooking oil and lemon. Dipping sauces were diabolically sweet and artificial tasting, with less personality than the little sachets you get at McDonalds.

It got worse. Even on paper this, the Worst Salad In The World, is indigestible - lettuce, strawberries (?), pears (??), raspberries (please stop) four or five pieces of horrid cheap shredded chicken that tasted of wet cotton wool, all bound together with a sweet dressing of some kind and, just because the ingredients hadn't quite been batshit mental enough up to this point, a weirdly tiny amount of feta cheese crumbled on top. There's no excuse for this dish; no dimension in the multiverse where it could have ever been a success. I can't reconcile in my rational brain the idea that somewhere, at some point in time, someone threw this madly inappropriate bunch of ingredients together and subsequently decided to charge people £11.25 to eat it. This is not a salad, it's a cry for help.

"Crab stuffed mushrooms" didn't appear to have anything to do with crab at all, but maybe this was a blessing. Swimming in a strange, thin, chemically sauce they were an alarming colour of off-yellow and tasted like grilled squash balls. Revolting, and yet by the standards of the rest of the food, they could almost be considered a highlight.

Of the mains, probably the "Dixie Fishwich" was the least aggressively ghastly, because you can't really mess up a tomato, and the frozen chips didn't contain, I don't know, gravel or razor blades or anything. But the fish itself was overcooked and mushy, and the bun was truly dreadful, cheap processed bread left to go stale.

"Shrimper's Heaven" was three cones of vaguely prawn-y brownfood, one cone of fries, and three pots of disgusting plastic slime that defied all attempts to explain or excuse. If this is heaven, then I'll see you in hell with my foie gras and my Robert Johnson records, no regrets.

And oh God, there was still more to come. Sad, soggy fritters of fried chicken sat on top of a huge mount of (actually not too bad) mashed potato, a strange, grey sweetcorn and a little pot of, well it was described rather optimistically as "gravy". It was at this point I began to lose my mind a little. The gravy tasted of literally nothing - I can't explain it any other way. It was if someone had thickened a couple of tablespoons of water with cornflour. I kept dipping the end of my fork in it and tasting it, over and over again, hardly able to believe what was happening. "It doesn't taste of anything. Why doesn't it taste of anything?" I remember repeating, over and over again. My friends each did their best to talk me down.

"Is this the worst meal you've ever had?", was the inevitable question asked as our barely picked-at plates were taken away and the last drops of diluted margarita were teased from novelty branded cocktail shakers. And the horrifying truth is that it probably isn't - the Hard Rock Café is still the most uncomfortable I've ever been in a restaurant, because on top of the terrible food at mad prices the service was also belligerent and mendacious. The staff at Bubba Gump were all lovely, serving with a commendable amount of positivity given what they were having to deal with, and at least there weren't any animatronic gorillas.

But comparisons between one nakedly cynical theme restaurant and another nakedly cynical theme restaurant are a pointless, and self-defeating, distraction. The fact any of them exist at all is, to misquote Charlie Brooker, an indelible blemish on the world's already questionable track record, and if I'm ever made prime minister, shutting down anywhere exploiting gullible tourists in a prime West End location will be my number one priority (or maybe second, just after the demolition of Clapham Junction station). Until that happens though, I can't do more than implore anyone who reads this to tell anyone who will listen not to eat at Bubba Gump Shrimp Company. It really is the pits.

1/10

If you find yourself stood outside Bubba Gump's wondering whether to risk it, firstly punch yourself in the face until you realise what an idiot you've been then quickly download my app to find somewhere good.

Clutch, Shoreditch

There used to be two pubs, each the kind of place where the England rhetoric put up in the windows veered just the wrong side of provocative and where if you weren’t accompanied by a dangerous dog you were very much in the minority.

One, on Hackney Road, was called the British Lion, which, when the BNP voter base dwindled sufficiently, closed down, remained derelict for a year or two then triumphantly opened as fancy wine bar Sager and Wilde. That’s gentrification for you, and whatever your feelings on the myriad of changes the East End of London has been through in the last few years, I’m afraid I do not miss The British Lion. Partly because I am not the target demographic for a far-right drinking den on Hackney Road but mainly because Sager and Wilde is so bloody good.

The other pub, The Ravenscroft, was never quite as openly belligerent as the British Lion, but still had the kind of atmosphere that created a metaphorical ‘needle slipping off the record’ sound as soon as you stepped through the door. Or maybe that was just me. Either way, it was hardly a friendly place, and when it too finally succumbed to the creeping gentrification from nearby Columbia Road and was billed to reopen as a “guilt-free, ethical fried chicken” joint (at least according to a press release so full of chicken and egg puns it put me off my lunch) then despite some doubts I prepared to welcome it.

Clutch makes one long for the days of warm pints of flat Fosters, sticky carpets and tacit aggression. There is so much wrong here it’s hard to know where to start, but the first thing you’ll notice is the service, shared between three people who seemed to find the whole business of ‘finding out what people want to eat then bringing it’ to be a challenge on the level of completing a PhD.

There was one woman, young and blonde and apologetic, who said she could take our drinks order but not food because “she didn’t know the menu well enough yet”. You’d think five minutes reading the thing would be an easy remedy for that, but anyway, her call. After far too long trying to attract someone else’s attention, a slightly more senior Irish woman appeared who went through the motions for a few seconds before literally losing interest between mains and sides and went off for a far more interesting chat with a male colleague. Then said male colleague came over a few minutes later and started the whole process again.

But if the service was traumatic, it had nothing on the food. Best of the two mains was a roast of sorts, consisting of a teaspoon of mash, two (!!) minuscule roast potatoes, what tasted suspiciously like packet stuffing, what tasted even more suspiciously like frozen Yorkshire pudding, and a quarter of roast chicken hacked into pieces and turned inside out like something from a Ridley Scott film. That picture is exactly how it was presented. This was £14.

But oh God, the “fried chicken”. A picture tells a thousand words (even one of my pictures) so I’ll give you a few seconds to take in the full horror of the “peanut chilli crust half bucket” before coming back to this post. Are you finished? Have you washed your teeth? Right, I’ll continue. It was, as you can probably see, burnt, and not just by a bit - the dried chilli was black and acrid, the peanuts huge and distracting, each forming part of a crust so thick and bitter and unpleasant it beggared belief anyone - the chef, the staff, anyone - would have considered it fit to serve.

Inside the ‘Ferrero Roche’ crust (as some wag pointed out when I shared my lunch on Twitter) was some slimy poached chicken but getting to it involved so much digging I soon gave up after unwrapping just one piece of thigh. Even more distressing was the fact the chicken itself - and this applied to the roast too - was actually of fairly good quality, which possibly went some way to explain why three bits of it came to £11.

A £4 bowl of very mayonnaise-y coleslaw (from a section headed “Sloppy Sides”) was eaten because it was edible, and for that we were most grateful, but if I’m paying £11 for three bits of chicken, even if they had been any good, is it too much to expect dipping sauces (sorry, “Dippety Dips”) to be free? Here, a small pot of “roasted garlic & creme fraiche” cost £2, and would have been another £2 if we’d had a small bowl of the “citric curd” as well. On second thoughts, perhaps it’s for the best we didn’t.

We ordered the bill, it came, it was wrong, we sent it back. It came back again, it was still wrong but this time in our favour so we shrugged and paid it. Even the two mains on their own, though, came to a total of £25 without service - this is not a cheap place. So it’s hard, really, to see why anyone should bother eating at Clutch. It’s expensive, the food is objectively not good (and repeated on me throughout the night), the service makes you feel like an inconvenience and there are better places (this is East London remember) within a minute’s walk. Come back, the Ravenscroft pub - all is forgiven.

2/10

Jamie Oliver's Diner, Piccadilly

Taking "inspiration" from an existing successful business is not, in itself, evil. Noting the success of Bubbledogs and the Big Apple Hot Dogs and then opening your own hot dog stall is not evil. Spotting the crowds in MeatLiquor and opening your own burger and cocktail joint is not evil. Being envious of the queues trailing down Beak Street from FlatIron then serving your own version of the dish is not evil. Wanting to get in on the market for slow-cooked BBQ ribs pioneered by Pitt Cue is not evil.

But doing all this at once?

It's not just that Jamie's Diner is cynical. It's not merely that it's an incoherent, paper-thin mess of a place that shouldn't have left the drawing board. It's way more than that. It's a multi-million pound cliché warehouse, a jumble of every single one of London's food fads all piled up on top of each other, each more disastrously "reimagined" than the last.

The menu is bone-jarring, multi-car pile up, so much so that pointing out all its failings would take a short novella never mind a blog post. There's a collection of "starters" of no obvious geographical origin, "cajun" prawns and "sweet potato quesadilla" jostling somewhat uncomfortably next to a Marie Rose prawn cocktail. There's a box of four "Classic Dishes" including a Reuben sandwich, a £15 chicken in a basket (one would hope you get the whole chicken for that; I bet you don't) and the worryingly singular "Giant Spaghetti Meatball".

There's another section for "salads" which has so many eye-twitchingly irritating phrases I got as far as "Super Duper Quinoa Salad" then gave up and moved on. The "Steaks" section has just two choices - a £16.50 "Flat-Iron" (for all its failings, at least Flat Iron Soho's is only £10 with a salad) and a completely bonkers "Rib-eye for two" for £60. There's a section for "waffles" which has only two choices; one with pulled pork and one - I swear I'm not making this up - with smoked salmon and horseradish cottage cheese which must rank with one of the most terrifying ideas anyone in charge of writing a menu has ever had. There's also a box for "burgers" where if you really want to push the boundaries you can specify extra sweetcorn salsa, gruyere cheese and piccalilli for £1 an item.

But if the menu is a car crash, just wait till you get a load of the food. "Guacamole tortilla chips" were notable insofar as they contained no tortilla chips, and very little guacamole, just some salty water biscuits of some kind, slowly dissolving under a pile of tasteless chopped tomatoes. They were served in a sort of bucket thing with a handle which I'm sure someone thought was a good idea.

"Dirty Barbecue Ribs" were burned, so it's hard to objectively rate their "dirty"ness, although if "dirty" means "sickeningly sweet and overcooked" then we're probably halfway there. A pile of chopped carrots and cabbage and who knows what else was entirely unseasoned and served no purpose, although bizarrely shoestring fries were crisp, perfectly seasoned and actually rather nice.

Worse was yet to come, though. "Giant spaghetti meatball" was, in fact, three or four totally normal-sized meatballs of flavourless mystery meat, nestled amongst slimy commodity pasta. They were garnished with sour cream, cheap parmesan and chopped parsley, the latter being all you could taste. "It smells like vomit," my friend pointed out thoughtfully, as she gamely prodded her way through it.

Dear God though, the pulled pork waffles. At first I couldn't remember if I'd ever tasted pulled pork quite this bad, and then it dawned on me - I had. At Jamie Oliver's other restaurant, Barbecoa. A winning combination of dry, sickly sweet and sloppy, their sugared-vinegar runoff had turned the waffles below from what were once presumably very bland but inoffensive carbohydrate into soggy, tooth-softening mush. Awful, and yet some deep-fried chillis, although slightly chewy, were genuinely tasty, with a gentle citrus tang and moderate heat. Which didn't go anywhere near redeeming the dish, just made the whole thing that much more psychologically bewildering.

Staff were enthusiastic - and numerous - but had a slightly eccentric habit of asking how everything was every five minutes, and given the amount of trauma involved in explaining the difference between beer and ginger beer to my eastern European waitress (a lot), I didn't feel like doing anything other than grunt "fine thank you" on each occasion. But what could they have done, anyway? Re-done the 12-hour pulled pork? Re-trained the chefs? Burned ribs aside, none of the food was cooked wrong, it just was wrong.

For all the grumbling about trend-chasing, and there has been a fair amount of grumbling (most of it from me), it's worth pointing out that however unimaginative a concept, when the food is decent, much can be forgiven. Clockjack Oven may have been rushed into field on the back of the success of Chicken Shop, but given that it's also serving lovely moist chicken and crunchy double-cooked chips for less than a tenner, who cares. And although it's tempting to blame MeatLiquor for BRGR, Burger and Shake and who knows how many other bland ripoffs, we can also thank them for Patty & Bun, Honest Burgers and Lucky Chip, all of whom London would be much poorer without.

The food here is terrible, but Jamie's Diner is enraging - apocalyptically, biblically enraging - because it has no ambition greater than to make some easy money off the back of the hard work of others, by scraping every barrel of London's current American comfort food fashions, and to exploit passing tourists and Jamie fans and get them out of the door before they realise they've been scammed. And if anyone else had put their name to this giant con trick, it would be criminal enough. But for Jamie Oliver, who has made a living for years out of telling poor people not to eat burgers, hot dogs and chips only to then charge way over the odds for the same food as soon as he realises there's money to be made, the nerve is astounding.

We are led to believe that Jamie's Diner is a "pop-up". We know this because it says 'POP-UP' on every menu, and it's plastered all over the walls and windows. In fact, the lease on the building is 3 years, which as anyone in the industry will tell you, is a perfectly acceptable period for a restaurant to last. The only way anyone would call their 3-year restaurant a "pop-up" would be if, not content with having ticked off nearly every other London food cliché, they wanted to jump on that bandwagon as well. And the cynicism, the lack of originality, the shallowness, that is all irritating enough. But to perform a volte-face on your own multi-million-pound-earning healthy-eating campaign to make yet more millions? That's shameful.

1/10

The Worst Restaurants in London

I know what you're thinking. What's the point of going to the effort of sending me to an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet in Piccadilly when the resulting post isn't the unqualified calamity you were hoping for? That's just the way the prawn cracker crumbled I'm afraid - Mr Wu's really wasn't all that bad, and in fact given the location, the clientèle and the price point, it acquitted itself rather well. 4/10 isn't a marvellous score by any stretch of the imagination but there is a world of difference between the merely mediocre and the downright awful; between the noble failures and the determinedly dire; between the disappointing and the diabolical. And so by way of an apology for the Chinese Burn that never was, here are my top (or should that be bottom?) five Worst Restaurants in London.

But first, some runners up, and a confession. The only reason Planet Hollywood, Chiquito, Bella Pasta, Garfunkel's, and a number of other lowest-common-denominator chains, ripoffs and ripoff chains aren't on this list is because (thank the stars) I haven't yet been to them. I'm fairly sure they're awful, but unless you're trapped in Gatwick waiting for a delayed long-haul flight, they're very easy to avoid.

Also, although I have never really enjoyed anything I've eaten at Yo! Sushi, Pizza Express, Ask, Zizzi's, TGI Friday's or Gourmet Burger Kitchen, and their ubiquitous presence on our high streets is a source of constant irritation, they each have their fans and deserve at least grudging respect for doing what they do with consistency. The fact that the cardboardy, beige Pizza Express pizzas have spread like a nasty rash all over the country is depressing, but depressing isn't enough to win a spot in the bottom five.

These five restaurants are not merely depressing, or overpriced, or cynical, or unpleasant. The food isn't just disappointing, the décor not merely drab, the service nothing so straightforward as incompetent. They are a special kind of awful, the kind that requires a particular set of variables to work in miserable harmony. Most bad restaurants, remember, soon go out of business; people vote with their feet. For somewhere bad to survive (and even to expand, God help us) needs very specific factors, ranging from a captive or clueless audience (airports, or tourist honeypots) to a glitzy brand or celebrity endorsement. They may also survive by virtue of using the cheapest possible ingredients (Brakes Bros is the go-to supplier for bad restaurants), marked up so ruthlessly that even a half-empty restaurants turns a profit. Ironically, running a bad restaurant takes energy, and thought, and skill. And these are the worst of the worst.

5. Frankie & Benny's

So there was plenty of competition for the fifth place in the list, and in fact I have a horrible suspicion that Frankie & Benny's may not even be the worst nationwide fake Italian-American-themed diner chain. But it earns a spot here because of the time my flight from Gatwick South Terminal was delayed and I slunk reluctantly in hoping the vast, laminated menu held at least one edible item. Well, if it did, I didn't find it. After a 45-minute wait (maybe they had to change the fuse on the microwave), flabby chicken wings came doused in a sickly sweet BBQ sauce that must have come right from the bottom of the Brakes Bros Bargain Bin, and a burger so bland it could have been mistaken for a lump of soft furnishing. I think it cost about £2,000. Something like that anyway.

Yes, there are other chains, maybe no worse and maybe no better than this. But Frankie & Benny's makes this list for what it represents - a vast, utterly charmless, relentlessly expanding chain serving food at investor-friendly markups, who have learned that by inventing a faux-nostalgic backstory and papering the walls with black and white pictures of New Yorkers from the 1930s (who would have laughed out loud had they been presented with anything from the F&B menu even then) they can somehow convince their victims - sorry, customers - that what they are eating somehow constitutes "authentic". Don't be fooled. They are the devil.

Location: All over the bloody place

4. Fire and Stone

It's easy to laugh at Fire & Stone, perhaps too easy. Anywhere that thinks duck hoi sin cheese pizza (I shit you not) is a menu item worth laminating, and that around Christmas time will sell you something involving turkey, brie, cranberry and gravy, is clearly setting itself up as the Frank Spencer of dining experiences. But to dismiss them as an elaborate joke is to ignore the real problem here; namely that with the brazen use of sheer, excruciating, pointless novelty for the sake of novelty they are convincing hapless diners that, against their better judgement, they really do want to eat a pizza topped with guacamole and roast potato and what's more, said guacamole and roast potato pizza is somehow an improvement on the status quo.

Proper pizza is a wonderful thing, as anyone who's ever eaten one from Donna Margherita in Battersea, Santa Maria in Ealing, Franco Manca in Brixton or the Pizza Pilgrims truck in Soho will tell you. It doesn't need messing about with, it doesn't need improving. It's almost as perfect a foodstuff as has ever existed, which is why they've been making it in Naples with a recipe pretty much unchanged for hundreds of years. The arrogance of anywhere that looks at an honest, beautiful margherita pizza and thinks "you know what? I wonder if we dump whatever we have in the fridge on this we can convince some witless tourists it's the way things are headed? Also, swap the base for semolina flour - I know it tastes of Lego but it's way more difficult for the chefs to cock up". I really do not like Fire & Stone.

Location: Covent Garden, Spitalfields, Oxford, Portsmouth and Westfield

3. Rainforest Café

Many "family-friendly" restaurants fall into the same trap. They spend so long worrying about themes and distractions and ball pools and paper hats and free crayon sets to keep the kiddies from getting bored and tearing the place up, that by the time it comes to the food, all their energies have already been spent. Rainforest Café has that problem, too, but because their budget is so many times bigger than other places, the Grand Canyon-sized gulf between the ludicrous animatronic animals and water displays and the - for want of a better word - crap that comes out of the kitchen is even more jarring.

Actually, you can probably find equally bad food elsewhere - the sad, greasy cowpat of a quesadilla was upsetting bordering on tragic, but I bet there's no better at Chiquito, and I'm sure the burger at Garfunkels is very much of the same ilk as the dry, rubbery discs of mystery meat inside sweet sesame seed buns at the RC - but dear lord the prices. That quesadilla - just cheese and vegetables in a thin case that had all the personality of a sheet of greaseproof paper - was £15.60; a toffee and banana crepe £6.95; a plain Caesar salad an astonishing £14.40. The markups, for these are clearly very cheap ingredients, must be some of the highest in London, and only a trickle of harassed parents and their offspring must be enough to keep the place afloat. Which is just as well, as on my visit half the restaurant was roped off and dark. Perhaps it's a sign it's not much longer for this world. We can but hope.

Location: Piccadilly

2. The Hard Rock Café

The only thing more wretched than the experience of eating at Hard Rock Café is the fact that it's always so popular. Every time I pass this place on the bus it's had a queue out of the door, which even if you assume that nobody ever goes back (and I think it's a fairly safe assumption), that's still pretty staggering.

If there was something - anything - about the place that would justify even the most cursory interest then I might begin to be able to get my head around it, but no - I do not have a single nice word to say about the place. It's hateful. We were served gloopy overcooked ribs in cheap sauce, a burger so inedibly cremated it actually made me laugh out loud, and then were presented with a bill that wouldn't have looked unreasonable for lunch at the Ledbury. Given its international brand and stratospheric prices, you'd be justified in thinking that maybe the décor was worth a visit, but all the cases of memorabilia looked like they had seen better days, and were of pretty marginal interest to even the most rabid rock and roll fan (a guitar Adam Clayton played. A couple of times. Woopie-do), and the bathrooms looked like a bomb had hit them. Where does the money go? It doesn't bear thinking about.

Location: Piccadilly

1. Aberdeen Steak House / Angus Steak House / Scotch Steak House

Nobody quite knows the distinction between these three near-identical but for some reason differently named restaurants. As far as I can gather, Aberdeen Steak House and Angus Steak House are owned by the same company, while Scotch Steak House split a little while ago from the main group and decided to forge its own path selling, er, exactly the same food as the others. So who knows. And who cares, because all you need to know is that, for more reasons than I have time to list here, they are a collection of the very worst restaurants in London, and most likely Britain, and very possibly the world.

Oh go on then, just a small list. The décor is battered and aged, either very nearly falling apart or very actually fallen apart. Staff are so uninterested and chippy they may as well be working in a Post Office, and manage the very impressive feat of doing a whole evening's service without looking anyone - least of all each other - in the eye. The food is terrifying - mealy, bruised steaks that taste of blood and liver, frozen chips, tinned mushrooms and a list of unfortunate 70s classics like prawn cocktail and ("our famous") melted Camembert made by people who neither know nor care what they're doing.

And for this bitterly miserable experience, with absolutely nothing to recommend it whatsoever, you'll pay a small fortune. And you'll leave feeling broken and dejected, bankrupt in every sense of the word, and not a little queasy. I have never known anywhere to suck the joy out of eating to quite such a degree - it's like having dinner in a gulag; completely and utterly devoid of hospitality and warmth and everything a restaurant should be. So while Hard Rock and Rainforest Café and all the others listed above are bad - very bad indeed - there still is nowhere to rival the sheer catastrophic, diabolical awfulness of Aberdeen Angus. A most worthy "winner".

Location: Not telling. It's for your own good.

Thanks to Abandon Spoon for the Christmas Pizza picture, and Shit London for the brilliant Aberdeen Angus lighting failure picture.